


Look, Fanfiction!

by kweerkitty



Category: Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Gen, don'thurtme, i'mscreamingthisismyfirstattemptatfanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-11-29 12:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11441112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kweerkitty/pseuds/kweerkitty
Summary: With the publication of the last Simon Snow book, Cather Avery is stuck—very, very stuck. Most people are stuck, in fact. Gemma T. Leslie won’t be publishing any more books, and the fic authors won’t have new inspiration coming their way every year and a half. Where do they go from here? A mind-numbing first shot at fanfic, by the fangirl of a fangirl.





	Look, Fanfiction!

Three weeks into summer, Cather Avery had _no freaking idea_ what to write _._ It was similar to the block she ran into face-first with Professor Piper’s final assignment, but worse. It was so, so much worse. How could this have happened?

Casting a forlorn glance at her bookshelf—specifically the one reserved for the Simon Snow series and its spin-offs—Cath quickly zeroed in on the culprit. _Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance._ Gemma T. Leslie. 2012. Simon Snow’s final adventure. The last source of canon inspiration. (Until the movie came out, that is. But everyone knows the movies aren’t as canon as the books.)

Four times, she read it. First with Levi. Then the whole series in order. (After that she’d been forced out of her room to Be Active with Wren.) The third time was all in one go, thirteen hours straight of Simon and Baz making up, of Simon defeating the Humdrum, of Simon ending. The fourth time…the fourth time, she went through and waited, almost impatiently, for any spark of creative energy GTL might’ve left dripping off the pages to zap into her head and say, “Hey, here’s an idea! What if…”

The most she’d gotten? Rewrite the canon ending _her_ way. Not the ending as she wrote it in _Carry On, Simon_ , but an ending based on GTL’s, an ending where instead of Simon and Baz “making up,” they end up making out. It was well-written, she supposed, but not as good as _Carry On._ It certainly didn’t have as much passion as _Carry On_.

Cath hadn’t finished _Carry On_ before the final book came out. She’d been too busy working on the short story for Professor Piper. Her fans had understood; as horny for fanfiction as they were, many of them were her age and urged her to finish her schoolwork so she could reward herself with finishing _Carry On_. The last chapter of her fic was published at three in the morning, approximately 27 hours after _Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance_ was officially published. Of course, some people finished reading the novel by then, but for the people who couldn’t get their hands on it, or who waited until they could read it aloud to their boyfriends…it was a fine time to end the tale.

_End_. Cath felt slightly ill at the thought. Completing _Carry On_  had filled her with such joy until she realized that, after reading _The Eighth Dance_ , she had no more juice.

“That’s impossible,” Wren scoffed when Cath admitted this to her over breakfast. “Magicath _always_ has more juice. It’s in there _somewhere_. Remember? It’s Simon! He’s never over, and you’re never out of juice.” She’d slammed OJ on the counter with a cocked eyebrow to prove her point.

Levi—God bless Levi and his stupidly beautiful chin—walked the fine line between encouragement and stress-inducing, as thousands of Cath’s fans did. Of course he wanted her to relax and be happy. Of course he wanted her to write. But he also had this habit of sliding up behind her in bed, wrapping his arms around her stomach, and mumbling, “Read me fanfiction,” which eventually turned into, “Write more fanfiction.” So she could read it to him. How had they gotten through hundreds of thousands of words of fic in so little time?

Cath rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. The blank page in front of her was giving her a headache. She closed the window (it didn’t even ask her if she wanted to save, because there was nothing there) and clicked over to her browser. Maybe other fic authors were having a similar problem? Maybe there was something about having the source of your writing, once continuous and seemingly endless, suddenly end that just made everything that much more difficult.

Magicath’s profile was already loaded on her browser screen. Under “Latest Story” was Cath’s sole attempt at a post-GTL fic. _It’s With You_ had thousands of hits, probably tens of thousands. Within hours of posting, fanart popped up, depicting Simon and Baz intertwined in a waltz, the caption, “It’s with you, Baz,” swirling around them in cursive. _“It’s with you, Baz. The eighth dance…it’s with you.”_

That was eighteen days ago.

Magicath was last active three hours ago, but last published _eighteen days ago_.

Cath tried banging the back of her head against the wall behind her and immediately regretted it. Anguished head-banging was a bad idea when she had a big ol’ hair clip keeping her tangled mess off her shoulders.

She readjusted it, cracked her neck, and hunched down over the list of authors she followed. Wren was one of them, but Wren hadn’t written much since high school. PewterPenny, Cath’s main source of Penelope-centered fics, was busy imagining Penelope’s bright future and writing behind-the-scenes adventures from _The Eighth Dance_ ; her multi-chapter fic _A Pretty Penny_ was phenomenal, but hadn’t updated since yesterday. Blubawlz was spitting out one-shots like mad, but Cath wasn’t in the mood for their skillful smut at the moment. Maybe later.

Levi’s voice in her head: _Read me fanfiction, Cather._

Her cheeks burned, and she quickly scrolled away from Bluballz’s bio.

DabblesNDrabbles was doing alright. Last published story: _Ever After_ , published two hours ago. Cath clicked the link. Chapter one of four was one hundred words of Simon proposing to Agatha. Cath guessed the next three would be marriage, children, and…death, maybe? DND tended towards the romantic.

Back to the list of authors. LeMage. Warri0r101. BubonicBaz. H4RL3YQU1NN. Brayzenly. IGTWJGSLHDKP (according to his bio, this was short for “I’m Going to Write John Green’s Stories Like He Doesn’t Kill People,” but he also wrote Simon Snow fics the same way). Cath could often tell what books or series got the author going on FanFixx.net by their name. The most obvious one was author GTLgotmegoingandnowICAN’TSTOP. Fans called her “gotmegoing,” which made for some hilarious comments, but anyway.

The authors were active, like Cath. Some of them were publishing like crazy, like Bluballz and DND. Others seemed to be stuck in a Simon Snow rut with Cath. BubonicBaz posted a journal entry three days ago entitled, _Where Do We Go From Here?_ The whole entry was BB going on a philosophical rant about how to keep up the fics when there was no new material coming to fuel the fics. A few of these authors—H4RL3YQU1NN and IGTWJGSLHDKP especially—were already branching out and putting more effort into their other fandoms, which made Cath a little sad. They couldn’t be done with Simon yet. She wasn’t done with Simon yet!

Was she?

No. Magicath couldn’t run out of juice, not now!

But Magicath _felt_ out of juice. Boy, did she.

Drained, Cath slumped against the wall. Her elbow hit the space bar, and suddenly she was looking at the bottom of the screen, at “Recommended Stories.” She almost scrolled back up—then something caught her eye. A fic description. With…that couldn’t be her name in it, could it?

> _With the publication of the last Simon Snow book, Cather Avery is stuck—very, very stuck. Most people are stuck, in fact. Gemma T. Leslie won’t be publishing any more books, and the fic authors won’t have new inspiration coming their way every year and a half. Where do they go from here? A mind-numbing first shot at fanfic, by the fangirl of a fangirl._

There couldn’t be that many Cather Averys on the planet. Only She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named would name their kid something as ridiculous as Cather. And who would go by that as a nickname for Catherine? It sounded too much like catheter. The thing hospital patients pee in when they can’t make it to the toilet. Surely no author or screenwriter would saddle their character with it, either.

Just in case, Cath Googled herself. As always, she seemed to be the only one online; the only results with both “Cather” and “Avery” were her social media accounts and a few links to school-sponsored writing competitions she’d won.

She returned to the fic description and reread it. Yep, it said Cather Avery, right there in twelve-point Verdana.

Mouth suddenly dry, Cath clicked the link to the story to get the stats. She wouldn’t read it unless absolutely necessary. Maybe Reagan made a FanFixx account to tease her over summer. Maybe Levi—no, Levi wouldn’t do anything like that. Wren? Probably not.

> _Author: kweerkitty_
> 
> _Title: Look, Fanfiction!_
> 
> _Rated: Teen And Up Audiences_
> 
> _Word Count: 2471_
> 
> _Chapters: 1_
> 
> _Publication Date: June 2012_
> 
> _Last Updated: June 2012_

Without taking her eyes from the screen, Cath pulled out her phone and texted Reagan. _You didn’t make a Fanfixx account under the name kweerkitty, did you?_

The immediate response: _hell no. what kind of name is that, anyway?_

Right.

Well.

Cath’s palms were sweating all over her laptop. She wiped them on her sheets before scrolling down to read the first lines.

> _Three weeks into summer, Cather Avery had_ no freaking idea _what to write. It was similar to the block she ran into face-first with Professor Piper’s final assignment, but worse. It was so, so much worse. How could this have happened?_
> 
> _Casting a forlorn glance at her bookshelf—specifically the one reserved for the Simon Snow series and its spin-offs—and quickly zeroed in on the culprit. Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance. Gemma T. Leslie. 2012. Simon Snow’s final adventure. The last source of canon inspiration. (Until the movie came out, that is. But everyone knows the movies aren’t as canon as the books.)_

Hadn’t…hadn’t Cath just thought those words a few minutes ago? About how this block was worse than the one for Professor Piper’s story, about how books are more canon than movies... Wait, how did this “kweerkitty” know about Professor Piper in the first place? How did she know about Cath’s “Reserved for Simon Snow” shelf? How… _how_?! Not even _Wren_ would know she was thinking these things right this moment! They were _thoughts_! Inside her brain! Not in the real world…

_A mind-numbing first shot at fanfic_ … Well, then, consider Cath’s mind numb. Numb, utterly confused, and slightly terrified.

She didn’t want to read the body of the fic. She scrolled down to the very end, to the last few paragraphs. Would it predict her behavior? Would it prove this was an elaborate nightmare spurred by her block? Did kweerkitty even exist? Did _Cath_ exist?

“No, of course you exist,” Cath muttered to herself, laughing nervously. “This is just what happens when you…at four in the morning!” She should’ve gone to sleep hours ago.

> _She should’ve gone to sleep hours ago._

 Oh, hell, no.

> _Oh, hell, no. So what if it was four in the morning? Half of_ Carry On _had been written at four in the morning. Surely inspiration would come now. Surely Magicath would find her magic again._

Cath felt ill. This kweerkitty girl could’ve easily known about _Carry On_ and Magicath. That didn’t surprise her. Thousands knew Magicath— _as Magicath_. Not as the real-world girl Cather Avery, former student of Professor Piper.

She skipped ahead a few lines. She couldn’t bear reading her own thoughts on the screen again. It was too creepy. Too existential. Too…multi-dimensional, almost. 

> _That was it! Of course that was it! She’d thought of these kinds of fics before, but they would’ve been so difficult at the time, the time before_ The Eighth Dance. _She didn’t know how it ended. Nobody did. But now that everyone knew…_
> 
> _Cath cracked her knuckles and opened a new document. She felt almost silly when she hit “Save As” and prepared to type in the title. It was so thirteen-year-old Cath. But it was also right-now-Cath, Cath-with-a-boyfriend, Cath-in-college, Cath-finally-overcoming-this-stupid-writer’s-block._
> 
> _Just because Simon’s adventure with the Humdrum was over didn’t mean he had no more adventures. Couldn’t Cath squeeze him and Baz and Agatha and Penelope into a new situation? A new world? Maybe one where nobody had ever heard of Simon Snow, other than as Gemma T. Leslie’s stunning and best-selling character._
> 
> _After a moment more of hesitation, Cath squeezed her eyes shut, typed the title so fast the keys sounded like burbling water, hit enter, and stared at the new blinking cursor under the document title._
> 
> Simon Snow and the Dimension of the Ninth.
> 
> _For the first time in eighteen days, Cath grinned at the blinking cursor. She knew exactly what to write._

The fic ended there. Cath hardly registered the unnerving knowledge kweerkitty had of her as a person, instead feeling her heart race underneath her _Simon Snow and the Seventh Oak_ movie premiere t-shirt.

This story—this version of Cath—whoever this was on the internet—something about it tugged at Cath’s heartstrings and pushed her cursor back to her word processor. She opened a doc. She hit “Save As.” She typed in, _Simon Snow and the Dimension of the Ninth_. Enter. It felt right. It felt thirteen years old, but it felt right nonetheless.

The blinking cursor stared at her, but didn’t intimidate her.

Words flowed from her fingertips.

Two hours and four thousand words later, sleep tugged on Cath’s eyes. She saved her doc, closed it, and saw kweerkitty’s story staring back at her from her browser window.

“I should probably ask you first, huh,” Cath mumbled, almost guiltily. She didn’t feel bad about writing fanfiction. But writing based on someone else’s fanfiction—especially an author she’d never heard of or read the works of before—that was different. Professor Piper’s accusations of plagiarism rang loudly in her head.

She clicked kweerkitty’s screen name to reach her profile and send her a private message, but the next page loaded as “404 Error: Page Not Found.”

Frowning, Cath Googled the name “kweerkitty.” Then she Googled “Look, Fanfiction!” Neither the author nor the story appeared. It was like they’d never existed in the first place. Even her browser history didn’t show the page—where it should’ve said “http://www.fanfixx.net/kweerkitty/102839737/1/Look-Fanfiction!” (or something like that), the history again read a 404 Error.

Cath’s head spun. Maybe she dreamt it. Maybe she was suffering writer’s withdrawal, and it was making her hallucinate. Sleep was a fantastic idea.

But then a message popped up in Magicath’s inbox. Sleep could wait an extra minute or so.

The message was from UNKWN, which Cath assumed meant “unknown,” and which sent chills down her bare arms. She opened it.

The message had two sentences.

_Don’t worry, Magicath. You can write in the ninth dimension. –kk_

Cath slammed her laptop shut and dove under the covers. Whatever this was—daydreams, real dreams, hallucinations—she was done with it. It was definitely time to go to sleep. At least when she woke, she would know exactly what to write.

**Author's Note:**

> I still can't believe I'm posting actual fanfiction on actual AO3. Also, as far as I know, none of those other "fic authors" listed are real. And yes, I know it isn't June 2012, but who says I can't time travel?


End file.
